The New York Times has a write up:
The heroes of Mr. Dickey’s book are Raymond W. Kelly, New York’s police commissioner, and David Cohen, a former top C.I.A. official whom Kelly hired to run the department’s intelligence operation. They essentially created their own wily little C.I.A., instantly deploying police officers overseas to gather information about terrorist acts and embedding them with foreign police departments.
The department did a lot of other things right, too — buying state-of-the-art equipment (high-tech helicopters, chemical and radiation sniffing devices), monitoring Middle Eastern Web sites, hiring elite academic talent.
Most important, perhaps, while the C.I.A. struggled to hire or train Arabic speakers in the aftermath of 9/11, the Police Department realized it had dozens of Arabic speakers already walking the beat. Because police work is often attractive to immigrants, the department already had hundreds who spoke other languages that were useful when it came to tracking down terrorists.
Once the department began to gather important information on its own, Mr. Dickey writes, it could deal with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. from a position of strength. “There’s no such thing as information sharing,” Mr. Cohen says at one point. “There is only information trading.”
Mr. Dickey is Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief and its Middle East regional editor, and he knows this material — he’d been reporting on Osama bin Laden and his networks a decade before 9/11. (Mr. Dickey is also the son of the poet James Dickey, and the author of a beautifully thorny memoir about his father, “Summer of Deliverance.”)
Mr. Dickey is critical of the Bush administration’s “gruesome occupation” of Iraq and of the so-called global war on terror. So, it seems, is Mr. Kelly. Mr. Dickey writes, “When Commissioner Kelly says the acronym as a single word, ‘the GWOT,’ it’s with a twinge of irony that makes it sound almost obscene.”
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